UberGerbil wrote:BTW, you can download the slides for the IDF presentations (once they've been actually been presented) directly from Intel. ARCS001 is the afternoon Haswell μarch presentation, for example.

OK.. I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I've figured out that I've been looking at Haswell from the wrong direction entirely.

When they pulled that demo with Haswell running at less than 10 watts, my brain started grinding and now I've got it: Haswell is not meant to compete with AMD, Haswell is meant to put up a giant brick wall in front of ARM so that ARM does not get an effective toehold in anything bigger than a tablet. I'll go into more detail later, but if Haswell happens to be faster than Trinity at IGP, that is more a beneficial side effect on Intel's way to its true goals with what it wants Haswell (and Broadwell even more so) to be.

chuckula wrote:OK.. I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I've figured out that I've been looking at Haswell from the wrong direction entirely.

When they pulled that demo with Haswell running at less than 10 watts, my brain started grinding and now I've got it: Haswell is not meant to compete with AMD, Haswell is meant to put up a giant brick wall in front of ARM so that ARM does not get an effective toehold in anything bigger than a tablet. I'll go into more detail later, but if Haswell happens to be faster than Trinity at IGP, that is more a beneficial side effect on Intel's way to its true goals with what it wants Haswell (and Broadwell even more so) to be.

The biggest selling point of Desktop Haswell is that it will be cooler than Ivy under the same overclock(unless they are stupid enough to not fix that solder issue), while also consuming less power at stock, the combination of those two means both more OC headroom & less OC thermal issues than Ivy which is good news.

More IDF news from fudzilla. Apparently, a 7.6W Haswell chip can match performance of a 17W IVB i3. I assume that's accomplished using Haswell's programmable TDP. Apparently, there will also be 17W Haswell CPUs that will exceed 17W IVB i3 performance. So....if IVB at 17W is called ULV...then Haswell at 7.6W will be UULV?

UberGerbil wrote: Interesting there's hw for image stabilization; that looks to be the first tablet-and-below dedicated feature.

So just to amend that: based on the presentations (Slide 26 of GVCS003) the IS h/w is for playback, rather than capture -- ie, stabilizing someone else's jerky stream or video, not the one you are capturing. Though of course it can be used to stabilize your live view of your own jerky video, and presumably could be applied to the version you're saving / streaming, that's not its primary purpose.

chuckula wrote:Haswell is not meant to compete with AMD, Haswell is meant to put up a giant brick wall in front of ARM so that ARM does not get an effective toehold in anything bigger than a tablet.

Yes, that's what I meant by

Low power usage is certainly the theme. If only the paranoid survive, then obviously ARM is the threat these days.

Anandtech says Haswell will have "Transactional Synchronization eXtensions" (TSX). This will allow developers to more easily write code that allows software to scale much more efficienty with multiple cores. A lot of the terminology is over my head as I'm no program writer, but the benefits of TSX look very enticing!

DPete27 wrote:Anandtech says Haswell will have "Transactional Synchronization eXtensions" (TSX). This will allow developers to more easily write code that allows software to scale much more efficienty with multiple cores. A lot of the terminology is over my head as I'm no program writer, but the benefits of TSX look very enticing!

Don't expect this to happen overnight. It is not just a matter of recompiling your applications. TSX will require careful rethinking of some code and programmers need to learn to use it. But the potential is certainly there.

DeadOfKnight wrote:Sometimes it's better to actually read a thread rather than just write in it.

FYI, I've read every single post in this thread. I'm trying to feed the conversation with hard facts, otherwise discussions tend to start running in circles since they are just speculation. While I realize that people can easily go to anandtech and find the same article themselves, it will be buried off their front page in a week. Seeing as though my "contributions" are unwanted, I'm done with this thread.

DeadOfKnight wrote:Sometimes it's better to actually read a thread rather than just write in it.

FYI, I've read every single post in this thread. I'm trying to feed the conversation with hard facts, otherwise discussions tend to start running in circles since they are just speculation. While I realize that people can easily go to anandtech and find the same article themselves, it will be buried off their front page in a week. Seeing as though my "contributions" are unwanted, I'm done with this thread.

DeadOfKnight was referring to the fact that he had posted the exact same link just two posts above.

Is anyone else starting to feel like Haswell is attractive not just because of what it brings to the table but because it might be the last true "mainstream-enthusiast" desktop processor? I mean, It could possibly be my next upgrade even if I don't upgrade for another 2 years because I don't like the direction they're going in for desktops. If rumors are true it looks like they're going to be pushing the power envelope down without major performance gains after Haswell.

Intel ushered in an attractive tier of product with K-branded Lynnfields, but it sounds like they are going to be dragged down into mobile territory with the rest of them. If that happens the only true enthusiast platform will be the big, expensive workstation CPUs and motherboards. I won't complain if software starts to catch up and utilize the many cores, but right now I really like the quad-core high-value enthusiast platform that might be going away in the future.

Maybe AMD will see the opportunity to fill the gap. If their APUs are up to snuff in the future, I might start looking at those.

Last edited by DeadOfKnight on Thu Nov 29, 2012 3:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

The problem is one we already know- CPUs are getting faster, and software is getting leaner, and computing is getting more mobile.

Just keep in mind that if Intel can engineer a CPU at 55W that can do more than what a 125W CPU used to be able to do, they can still make a 125W CPU that's at least twice as 'powerful' as that 55W unit.

Killer applications on desktops is what will make Intel buck the trend they're on, and that's highly unlikely; outside of dedicated gaming, I'm not aware of an application for a powerful CPU that shouldn't already be running on a real workstation instead of a 'desktop'.

Just wait till we have interactive holographic phones and TV's (like that scene in Iron Man)... then the CPU processing power will ramp up and will force Intel and AMD to keep innovating on the performance/power envelope.

I agree it ought to be taken with a grain of salt. However, JEDEC DDR4 specs have been finalized for several months now, so it isn't too far-fetched that we could see the first DDR4-capable platforms soon.

Edit: Just saw DeadOfKnight's reply.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson